Alice to Prague Read online

  As I put the guitar down, I had a thought—why not focus my teaching here around songs? That would make grammar and spelling fun and surely the students would want to learn English more if it involved music. When I told Nad’a, she was enthusiastic. ‘Yes, yes, that will give the students some nice way to think about words!’

  My parting words to the class were, ‘Next time I will tell you about School of the Air. Each school day I spent half an hour on my two-way radio and spoke to my teacher, Mrs Hodder, who was in a broadcasting room in Alice Springs. I was joined by students from hundreds of miles away. I think you will find it interesting.’

  A stunned silence followed. The class stared at me as though I’d come from another planet, which in effect I had. They farewelled me with ‘Na shledanou, Taaanya!’

  Pavel, all blue eyes and charm, came up to the front, shook my hand and murmured, ‘Thank you, that was wonderful, Taaanya. Next time, we teach you even better expression.’

  ‘I can’t wait!’ I couldn’t stop smiling, inside and out.

  Outside the classroom, a tall slender girl waited. Long blonde hair fell down either side of a petite face and her words spilt out in breathless fits and starts.

  ‘Hello, Taaaarnya, so please, Taaaarnya, I am Kamila, from 3B, and I wish to welcome you to our school. Also, I would like to invite you on bicycle to visit my grandmother in nearby village for wild strawberry picking in forest when the spring is here.’

  Her eyes shining and delicate nose crinkling, she rushed on.

  ‘And please, Taaaarnya, I want to learn all I can with you, I must practise the English speaking a lot. I am verrrry happy you are now here with us. I want to be excellent English speaker and I hope you will help me because I want to travel the world and become au pair and study languages and perhaps start my own business. Goodbye! I must go now to next lesson. See you soon, I very much so hope!’

  She raced off, all willowy frame and flowing blonde hair and giggles.

  I leant against the wall, dazed and disbelieving.

  Who would have thought I’d spend a morning with sixteen-year-olds who considered my life exotic? Their beautiful, fresh energy and interest had rejuvenated me and I now felt much better. Pavel and Kamila had given me something additional too: the promise of open doors, a way into their community, an unexpected heart connection with them both. Such a rare gift of trust. It felt precious and I hugged it to myself.

  Back in the staffroom, I told Nad’a about Kamila and she beamed. ‘Kamila is one of the best girl English speakers in the school. You can ask Pavel and Kamila to help you, anytime.’

  She offered me another coffee and added, ‘Me as well, of course!’

  I wanted to hug her too but said no to the coffee.

  One Turecká káva in one day was more than enough for this Australian girl.

  What I really wanted was more food.

  ‘I will take you to the “nearest pub” so you can tell your class tomorrow!’ said Nad’a, and I excitedly followed her out of the school. We passed a butcher’s shop with beer and spirit bottles stacked in the window and Nad’a told me I could conveniently buy a drink while waiting in the queue, or along with my meat purchase. Next was a tiny store with potatoes and pitchforks in the window: hardware or grocery? But before I had time to ask, Nad’a opened the door to a tiny bar filled with people.

  Everyone stared as we walked in, but with Nad’a I felt brave and happy again, like I belonged. We sipped Cinzano in little glasses and I hoovered up a huge řízek. Then I bombarded Nad’a with questions about Czech life. Her mother was Russian and she had already travelled a great deal, including to visit her sister who lived in America. No wonder her English was so good! She was passionate about teaching English to enable students to broaden their horizons and travel. ‘You and I will work together to help them achieve this,’ she enthused.

  Buoyed by my connection with Nad’a, I could have talked with her all afternoon, but like every woman here she was busy at work and home and had to leave for her next commitment.

  ‘This weekend, please let me prepare the dinner for you with my family,’ she offered.

  I threw my arms around her.

  ‘You have no idea how much that means,’ I said, overwhelmed with happiness.

  Moreover, I could proudly report back to Pavel’s class tomorrow that I’d found the nearest pub.

  8

  Foreign correspondent

  It was dark and bitterly cold. I moved slowly and nervously, coughing, trying to orientate myself with Maruška’s instructions among the strange street signs. My internal navigation guide wasn’t doing so well without a known horizon to guide me. But Maruška had also invited me to dinner at her home, and I was both thrilled and determined to find my way there. She and her computer teacher husband, Franta, spoke good English and had been great friends of Peter Barr, so tonight I hoped to learn more from them about the history of their country.

  Finally I found the right place, just after 6 p.m., noting that Maruška lived in a different area of town to me—on a hill lined with older and smaller apartment blocks that looked friendly in comparison to Panelák Block Four. The door swung open and I looked up into the smiling eyes of Franta. He shook my hand warmly. Filip, aged two, clung to his mother’s hip; his eyes took me in warily as she welcomed me inside.

  ‘Please, take off your shoes. Here are slippers.’

  Maruška handed me something faded and furry. ‘We need to protect our floors from the snow and mud and dirt. Peter Barr did think it was funny too,’ she added helpfully.

  ‘Please.’ Franta ushered me into a tiny, spotless living room and I stepped back in time. It was decorated with the furniture I remembered from my childhood—lots of light-brown wood and cabinets with sliding glass doors showcasing glassware, crockery and knick-knacks. It reminded me of Mum and Dad’s wedding furniture, which had been considered very fashionable in the 1960s and ’70s. The moment moved and swirled; I felt as though little M’Lis, Brett, Benny and I might jump out any minute, in pyjamas, ready to say goodnight.

  Franta beckoned me to a low table in the middle of the room where we sat. He opened a bottle of Moravian red wine. Maruška brought egg-topped finger sandwiches to the table. The room was warm and cosy and I felt very happy. I wasn’t alone, I’d stopped coughing and I was with people who spoke very good English.

  After my first glass of wine, I felt emboldened to ask the questions that had been on my lips since I’d arrived. What was life like for them now that communism had gone? Were things improved? Did they relish their freedom? I didn’t dare express my own view—that it was difficult to see that anything much had changed for them in Sedlčany—although of course I didn’t know what it had been like before 1989.

  Franta listened thoughtfully to my questions. He paused, then spoke slowly. ‘It is not so easy question to answer. The life is complex. Nothing is simple or black-and-white. In some ways life is better, in other ways it is not.’

  ‘Communism was very bad for many years—yes, of course,’ Maruška added, ‘but not so much by the very late 1980s. People were flexible. Most people here were not political. If you did not join Party, you got less pay, but that was okay. We had culture and music, books and art—we had a rich life in different ways.’

  I must have looked confused. Franta shrugged. ‘We have here the most beautiful nature you can imagine and the nature is a big part of our life. It is not so nice in late winter now, that is true, but in spring and summer and autumn, we can cycle and swim and take canoes in the rivers and pick mushrooms and go camping in the forests. That is the kind of life we love. Sport, being outside, music, family fun. That is how we survived under communism. We made a life for ourselves back then that is not so easy to enjoy now.’

  ‘And why is that?’ I was struggling to keep up.

  ‘People are now scared about money and how to make a life. Since Velvet Revolution, people think more of money than the important things. They worry about how to pay the
rent, buy the bread. We do not understand this so-called democracy world. We grew up with government paying us to live.’ He leant forward, fingertips pressed together. ‘This new world is already causing family breakdowns and loss of culture and worries.’

  In my head paradigms shifted, collided, slipping with the wine into a form of internal chaos. Could a Western-style free market economy really be that oppressive? Could it cause the Czechs to dangle in transition—not knowing anything but the old and not knowing how to embrace the new? My Western foundations wobbled, as did my now empty glass and I.

  ‘I saw the Berlin Wall fall,’ I said. ‘I thought it would be the start of something much better.’

  Franta considered me thoughtfully, no doubt thinking: This Australian girl is so naive—did she think we could jump overnight from a totalitarian regime into a market economy?

  Or Czech words to that effect.

  ‘Transition is always difficult,’ he said at last. ‘We had been occupied for so long. We do not have the skills, the experience, the knowledge to know how to get through transition. Many people cannot and will not change at all.’

  ‘I have prepared our dinner,’ Maruška interrupted, and I was thankful for a break in the tension. I needed to get my head around these different ways of thinking. I was also ravenous and thrilled at the prospect of hot home-cooked food.

  Maruška laid out plates overflowing with řízek (the now-ubiquitous pork schnitzel), warm potatoes laced with caraway, and gherkins. The delicious food bolstered me, and after another glass of Moravian red, I dared to pose one last question.

  ‘Does this new world not offer new opportunities, though? You are free to travel abroad and live as you wish. You can make money if you wish. And you don’t have to live in fear of government—or of being sent to Siberia. Isn’t that kind of freedom worthwhile?’

  Franta looked weary. ‘Yes and no. As a teacher, it is hard to have enough money to travel abroad or change our lifestyle. It is true some people will be pleased and will have the money to make much out of these changes. But we Czechs don’t move much anyway. It’s not part of our lives.’

  ‘Already we see moves in Poland and Hungary to bring back socialist governments,’ Maruška added.

  I was incredulous. ‘Will it happen here?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Both my hosts shook their heads. ‘The Czechs are likely to focus on democracy and reform because our big government wants to become part of European Union. But it’s not easy. When we have elections in a few years, we’ll see then.’

  I stumbled back to my tiny bedsit that night, head reeling. Never had I considered the benefits of centralised socialist rule. Or the principles of equal distribution of wealth. Or freedom from worry about making enough money to pay the bills, which in turn gave people the time and opportunity to pursue community and cultural matters. It never appeared on Dad or Mrs Howe’s respective Modern European History radars.

  Of course, in exchange, these people had to do the work of the government on its terms, but was giving up the ‘freedom’ they had once enjoyed a small price to pay for that security and lifestyle? For the capacity to ‘care for family’ and their community as a whole? And for the ability to maintain the extensive, rich culture I was now hearing about?

  Frankly, I still wasn’t convinced.

  I found it hard to see Soviet glories beyond the hunched shoulders under coats fraying at the edges, the vacant eyes, the worn bodies and the grey, polluted streets of Sedlčany. Not to mention the architecturally monstrous paneláky that dominated the skyline.

  But Nad’a had tut-tutted when I told her I was distressed by the paneláky. She explained that not everyone thought they were bad. ‘Many people were happy to go into paneláky when they were built. Many people in the country were living like peasants back then, in terrible places—no running water, no proper electricity, much poverty. The former regime gave them proper home for the first time.’

  As I curled up in my panelák that night, I tried really hard to be grateful for mine, and kept seeing those paradigms shifting, colliding and reworking themselves.

  The next day I received a real-life example of Maruška’s and Franta’s concerns.

  I’d woken to a blinding hangover (note to self—beware too many glasses of Moravian wine) and headed to school, with a hacking cough and aches all over once more. Several cups of Turecká káva bolstered me for the day but by late afternoon I was flagging again. As I headed towards the staffroom for more coffee, my gorgeous sixteen-year-old student Kamila intercepted me. She waved her arms wildly.

  ‘Hello, Tanya, it is so nice to see you, I am so happy you are here. Please, after school I have to take some things to my mother who works at the Sedlčany flour mill. Will you come with me?’

  Kamila’s energy was so light I felt intoxicated all over again just being with her; she was the equivalent of several bottles of champagne. As we hurried through the afternoon’s chill an hour later, she giggled a lot and kept telling me how much she wanted to learn English so she could run away and see the world. ‘France, I want to go to France, to learn the language, meet some nice French boy!’ She giggled some more.

  The factory was situated on the outskirts of town. We entered to a blast of noise. Rows and rows of sweating women worked on production lines that stretched the length of the building and up several floors. They carried heavy bags of flour in and out while the men worked on heavy machinery. Despite the noise, the women wore no ear protection, or any protection for that matter. The building and equipment looked rundown, reminding me of a wartime labour camp. Kamila told me that the women packed bags of flour for eight hours a day. There were three different positions on the production line and the women were rotated into those positions every two hours. It was hard, mindless, back-breaking work, yet most had worked there for years.

  Kamila’s mother came over to meet us at the door, a kindly, round soul wrapped in an apron. Her eyes were tired although they lit up as we shook hands.

  Kamila’s mother couldn’t speak English, but Kamila yelled over the noise. ‘My mother wishes to invite you for our famous Czech dishes in our panelák very soon.’

  I was so touched and my thanks felt inadequate. I felt ashamed of my own petty worries in light of the difficult life Kamila’s mother appeared to be living—and her generosity despite it. I thought of my own mother, who had never worked in a factory. Mum worked hard on the land and had spent years cooking and cleaning and looking after many people. She was never able to stop working. But she had worked in her own place, in her own space, in freedom. She’d stood under wide blue skies every day, ruling the roost on her own terms. She’d never been forced to work in a place like this, a place that to my eyes seemed so soul-destroying.

  Kamila and her mother spoke rapidly in Czech for a few more moments, and her mother’s face tightened as she blinked back tears. As we hurried away, Kamila explained. ‘With regime change, my mother and her comrades here now have big worry. They could lose their jobs. It may be very soon.’

  This seemed like the kind of problem Maruška and Franta had mentioned, and Kamila confirmed it. ‘There are problems about costs because mill has to buy new equipment. Before, the government would make the buying. Now it must be the owners. When that happens, there will not be enough money to pay all the people.’ For the first time, Kamila’s face creased, like she might cry too. ‘This has never before happened in Sedlčany.’

  As we headed away, she added, ‘My mother is not trained in anything else. The wages there are bad but at least it is her job. Her friends are here. What will she do?’

  I would have thought escaping that hellhole would be a bonus. But as Kamila talked, it was clear that having something to hold onto, something that you had always known—even working in a sweatshop for terrible pay—was better than the gaping void that lay in this brave new world the Czechs were facing.

  Something else was very clear too. My Western loneliness and homesickness didn’t begin to c
ompare to these real-life difficulties, and my uninformed Westerner’s attempt to understand what these people really were struggling with was unequal to the task.

  As Kamila farewelled me back at the school I felt deeply uncomfortable. But even though I didn’t really understand what it all meant, and as strange and confronting as I was finding everything, I knew I had a lot to learn here from these courageous Sedlčany people.

  9

  You will not die on my watch!

  Zorka, Ivana, Štěpánka, Luboš, Milan, Jan, Radim, Marek, Lenka, Radovan—oh dear. Who was who? And who was a girl and who was a boy? And assuming I worked that out, how did I pronounce their names, much less spell them? And then remember them?

  I spent the first week or so getting on top of the names of my students. Some names were clear, like Petr and Michael. Others were less so, like Jan and André (boys’ names, not girls’, apparently). Štěpánka and Lenka were girls. Zorka? I had no idea until told (also a girl): this one was gorgeous, with waves of brown curls, and she spoke English beautifully. Things became more complicated when the students talked to each other, or about each other, because when they did they changed the endings and the pronunciation of their names. (The reason? Latin-style case declensions, apparently.)

  If the students thought my upbringing was like something from another planet, I was amazed at theirs. They largely knew nothing of the West and had lived most of their lives without communication with the outside world; ironically, this reminded me a great deal of the way we grew up in the bush. They made music together, played games together, created all sorts of activities out of nothing, just like we had. I loved being part of their energy, and sharing music and stories.

  However, despite my best attempts to be a useful teacher during the first few weeks, I continued to struggle with my own demons. Every day was grey, freezing cold and smoggy with sulphur. Cold, grey days had always been my nemesis. At boarding school they crushed my being into bronchitis, over and over again, and when I left school I declared I would never, ever again live in a cold, grey place. Now I was dealing with not only more of it but the sulphur pollution as well. Blue skies and sunshine seemed a lifetime away.